Homebrew - The Good, Bad and Ugly of OSX Packaging

Some of the things that Homebrew does well, badly and the special challenges that OSX packagers need to deal with.

Homebrew is a popular package manager for OSX. We have a relatively unusual contribution and maintenance model and some practices that differentiate us from other package management systems on both OSX and on Linux. This talk will discuss some of the lessons learnt from maintaining Homebrew to facilitate discussion of how we and other package managers can do better.

The audience for this talk is primarily developers of other package managers and maintainers of Unix distributions. We all do things in slightly different ways so this talk aims to facilitate discussion of what we can do better and how we can work together to minimise repeated work. Audience members will learn about Homebrew, how to encourage more contributions to package managers and how to handle a large number of packages will very few maintainers and time spent.

The plan would be a 15m somewhat interactive talk with 15m discussion afterwards.